In hindsight, all I needed was a collar around my neck. They would have loved it, and it would have been the easiest way to fool them into putting their guards down, into thinking that I was docile.

My captors had already blinded, bound, and gagged me. None of that was necessary. They were stronger than me, and I was disarmed, frocked up in a loose-fitted suit with the tie on too loose. So why did they bother binding me up like this, you ask?

Because it was all for show. Literally.

“Next segment in two minutes!” a guttural voice called. “Bring the humans up.”

A gentle prod at my back from a hand that was large enough to engulf my head, and I was walking of my own volition. Well, not like I had many options. I either complied or…

“Grab its arms,” came a shout.

“It’s legs, too. It’s kicking a lot.”

“Damned humans!”

“Fffk muu. Mll krll nu rrl!” the human raged into their gag.

I could hear her scuffling, struggling against overwhelming odds. The ones holding her didn’t care for such things. Nor did she stand an angel of a chance against them. All she was doing was making a short lived show.

Ironic. If she’d waited a bit and they would have made a show out of her. I exhaled a sigh and kept walking, letting the hand on my back guide me.

Sounds suffocated me as I approached. Applause, a pre-recorded musical segment, and a trio of warbling, cheery voices echoed by powerful speakers. The giant hand left my back and shifted to just in front of my chest. I bumped roughly against it and waited.

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. This next part was going to be the most objectifying and cringy moment of my life. And I’d had my fair share of objectification already. My struggling companion didn’t help; I was about to be compared to a lunatic. Not that it mattered. Everyone out there already thought I was pathetic. They had a point—I was inferior to them in all ways: strength, intelligence, stamina, agility, rationality. There was nothing I could do in any walk of life that any one of them couldn’t do better. Well, actually, there was one thing.

“And now!” the hosts piped in unison. A drumroll sounded. Through the stitches of the sack on my head I watched the room ahead go dark. “The moment that some of you have been waiting for. Presenting, the humans!”

The drumroll came to a dramatic close and the audience erupted into cheers. The guiding hand ushered me forward and I walked into the thunder of applause and music with my head held high. I was stopped then spun to face an audience I couldn’t see. With deft speed, the sack was removed from my head and the cheers rose again, reinvigorated.

I was on a stage, in a live studio, and the audience was a motley of caricatures. Towering to the roof; small enough to fit ten to a chair; leathered wings; cyclopes; furry faces; animalian bodies; red skinned; blue skinned; fangs and claws and plenty of other oddities that I was so used to seeing that I didn’t think anything of it. Until I reminded myself that this, that all of this, was so, so wrong.

And horns, of course. Every fucking one of them had a pair of horns poking from their ugly heads.

They were our conquerors, our superiors, our overlords. They were demons. And they were cheering me to my grave.

My escort—who was doubling as a prison warden tonight—had thrown me in a cage. The back was open, and the enormous bastard stood behind it. He was at least a metre taller than me and he had a horse’s body from the waist down. Don’t confuse it for a centaur, though: these mean bastards are called bunè, and unlike their mythical counterparts they live for violence and give no fucks about honour. This one had a mask over his face, to prevent retribution on the off chance that I survived. He had nothing to worry about.

Another cage on the opposite end of the stage boxed in the woman who’d been kicking and screaming. Well, she was still kicking and screaming, but her escort—two of them, actually, and bunè just like mine—had her pinned against the bars in front of her so that she couldn’t fight back.

She was pretty, but in a rough kind of way. Dark hair gone wild from the fighting, large eyes turned harsh, thick cracked lips, heart-shaped face lined with stress, athletic limbs. She was dressed plainly in a black tank top that clung to her chiselled abs and matching skin-tight black shorts—both practical and revealing at once, and likely what she’d been wearing when she was captured. She would have had a lot of men chasing her, if she wasn’t so damned insane.

The audience’s cheers came to an orderly halt, most likely obeying the cues thrown to them on the crowd-facing monitors. Then a microphone floated towards me. Well, floating was how it seemed. It was held by a disembodied, white-gloved hand, which held the microphone back towards an invisible mouth as an opposite hand pantomimed human gestures.

“Welcome, human, to Meet The Participants!”

She sounded like a chipmunk being scratched up by a DJ. There were two other pairs of gloves floating around her that looked identical to the one holding the microphone. I’d heard the voices of these ladies, if one could call them that, so often that I could distinguish them by the subtle inflections of their voices. This one was Atropos, and her sisters were Clotho and Lachesis. Yeah, the three Fates, but with none of the weaving crap like the stories told of. They were known as the Sisters and they were technically one demon. They had no form other than their hands, and their voices were, literally, disembodied.

Atropos held the microphone to Clotho. “Since the other human is showing signs of mental instability right now, we’re going to start by interviewing you! How does it feel to be one of two humans participating in the one hundred and first Culling?”

Atropos shoved the microphone in my face. The bunè at my back removed the gag from my mouth and I let out a long loud sigh of relief. What did I care if the first sound I made on live international television, witnessed by hundreds of millions of humans and demons alike, was some weird groan?

“Thrilled,” I said tartly. “Couldn’t be happier to die along with some of the meanest demons on Earth.”

As soon as the crowd heard those words, they started booing. Though it was fun to screw with them, I didn’t feel like smiling. Besides, if I stayed calm and acted aloof, it would rile them up even more. I wouldn’t let them have their catharsis at my expense.

Lachesis “shoved” her way in front of the microphone, and Atropos’ free hand flung out the way. Of course, there was nothing to push, they just did this for the show. “Your name is Algier, right?” she said. The audience went silent on cue.

I said nothing and stared at where I thought Lachesis’ eyes would be.

“No need to answer, of course. It was a rhetorical question! As everyone at home, or wherever else they are viewing this show from, may or may not be aware, the Culling is the final chance for the most terrible criminals on Earth to save themselves from extinction. A death sentence with a ninety-nine-point-seven percent chance of success! Algier, why don’t you tell the audience why you are here?”

I leaned towards the microphone, pressing my forehead to the bars. “Jaywalking.”

Boos again. It was comical how scripted this exhibition was.

Atropos pulled the microphone back to where her face was meant to be. “No no no. That’s all wrong!” The crowd settled down again and she carried on. “You are here because you erased a demon with prejudice!”

“Worse!” wailed Lachesis. “He did it with a Class 6 demon-slaying weapon!”

The microphone shifted to Clotho. “Tell us, Algier. What made you do this? What is it that drove you to erase a not-guilty-enough-for-erasure demon?”

Atropos passed the microphone back to me. I cleared my throat and stared deadpan through the sisters’ invisible forms. “I was framed.”

More booing. I let a smile slip for the briefest moment before returning to my act.

See, there’s only one thing that humans excel at over demons, for the simple fact that demons are completely incapable of doing it.

Lying.

And that is a fact that every demon hates. After all, lies are power.

“That’s subjectively outrageous!” Atropos cried. “You were caught with the gun in your hand and ash all over your clothes. You didn’t even deny it to the law-enforcement-through-mostly-non-violent-means force.”

Microphone to Lachesis. “I am sure there will be many demons—”

“Though not implying any specific quantity or percentage,” Atropos interjected.

“—that will want to see Algier here get eliminated in the first Ring.” Assenting applause.

“Hold up!” Clotho cried, raising a hand. “We still have one more question.” The audience went silent. “Algier! On the low chance that you survive the Culling, what is it that you’ll ask the Marquises for? Think big! It can be any one thing that you want. The Marquises have the power to make almost any of the winners’ wishes come true.”

They knew I was going to lie. At this point it was just a game. They ask a question and I give an outrageous answer, making them feel justified in their hatred of me.

I leaned towards the microphone. “Three kilos of blue ash, two Class 6 pistols, and an enepsi to suck my dick.”

The jeering came right on queue. Though they were behaving as the prompter instructed, the demons were enjoying this. They didn’t like to play games or read fiction or listen to music. They didn’t experience “fun” in the same way humans did. They lived a life of purpose, dedicated to a single, unchanging cause. Spectacles like the Culling, the catharsis of watching the guilty be brought low by the guilty, the tactics and techniques put on display by demons as they fought to survive; that was a demon’s entertainment.

What demons want more than anything else is to have their purpose reasserted to them. It brings on the illusion that they are one step closer to fulfilling their unceasing desires. And there is no greater threat to a demon’s desires than the lies and deceits that humans disgorge like fires from Hell.

“But enough of that!” Clotho cried, and the crowd went obediently silent. “We have two humans today! That’s two more than the last Culling and twenty less than the one before.”

“They’ll have to watch out, because they’re heavily outnumbered, and there are plenty of demons in any Culling that really hate humans,” said Lachesis.

“Anyway,” Atropos sang, “let’s introduce our other partic—”

“Come closer and I’ll tear your bitch hands to shreds!”

The guards had pulled my human companion’s gag off, and the moment her mouth was freed she took the liberty to spew a non-ending stream of verbal diarrhoea.

“Fuck you all. When I win this shit, I’m going to ask for a nuclear fucking bomb and blow you unholy fucks back to Hell. I’ll—”

A giant hand shot through the open back of her cage and wrapped around the human’s neck. Her voice was strangled to silence immediately. Of course, the idiot tried to claw and kick her way out while her face turned red, then blue. The woman’s nails slashed through the bunè’s skin, causing faint shimmering wisps to disperse into the air, but the demon barely noticed. That mean bastard looked strong enough to recover that much of his corporeal form after resting for five seconds in Hellfire.

The Sisters all clutched each others’ hands, letting out a nervous eep into the microphone as one.

“Well, since this human is being even less cooperative than the liar over there,” Clotho gestured towards me, “we’re going to fill in our wonderful-sometimes-but-terrible-more-often audience on who, what, and why this second human is.”

“Her name is Berlin,” said Lachesis.

“She likes guns and kicking things,” said Atropos.

“When she was a child human,” Clotho said, clasping her hands in mock adoration, “she wanted to be a superhero.” The audience awed.

Atropos ripped the microphone back. “But instead, she gave up on her human dreams to become a demon hunter!”

A horrified gasp escaped the audience as one. Then the room erupted into madness.

Obscenities were shouted, chairs were thrown, curtains were climbed, demons were thrown! The place had gone chaotic. The cameras spun around and lights flicked on over the audience. There was no security, but there didn’t need to be. Every one of these exaggerated freaks had signed a contract before entering the studio that prevented them from causing any real harm to the show, its crew, and its actors. Unless they found some tiny loophole, which was highly unlikely, there was no way they could violate it. Controlled madness, bound by a contract that demons lacked the ability to break. I just watched the whole thing with indifference.

“Please, settle down,” Atropos said.

At once, the demons went silent and returned to their chairs. If they didn’t have a chair because someone had thrown it, another demon would pass it to them. Within a few seconds, the room looked like it hadn’t just been a warzone.

“We have one more thing we’d like to do before we send these participants off to prepare for the Culling,” said Clotho.

“A game we play with all humans on Meet The Participants!” Lachesis added.

Atropos swung her hand wide. “Alright, Sisters. Catch!”

The Sister threw the microphone in the air and a scherzo tune played over the speakers. Then the six hands started tumbling. They dived and clasped and tangled and spun until no demon could tell the three identical pairs of hands apart. As the microphone came down, the hands all scrambled over each other for it until one escaped from the pack and caught it, bringing the music to an abrupt halt.

They held the microphone up and spoke in unison. “Which Sister is which?”

Pleiades. That’s what the Sisters are. What distinguishes a pleiades from all other demons is one thing: inconsequentiality. No matter what they do, they’re of no importance in our non-existent god’s schemes. You could stab them, shoot them, throw them into the sun. Nothing. Likewise, they couldn’t do anything to demons and humans alike. Their only point of interaction with the world is the tasks they perform in their singular, unchangeable, menial job. Honestly, anyone could take those jobs from them since it’s not like they’re exceptionally good at them or anything, but since a Pleiades can do nothing else but that task, it makes sense to just give it to them. Which, of course, means less work for humans like me.

However, there is a little quirk to their inconsequential nature: humans always know who they are, where they are, and what they are. Always. It’s so fucking annoying.

I went from my left to right. “Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos.”

They all turned to each other, and if they had faces they would have look thrilled. “Wow, you got it right!” they cheered. The crowd cheered with them. “What a good human!”

The Sisters then leapt onto my head and gave my brown hair a vigorous tussle. I stood there with my dark eyes narrowed, watching the crowd clap mechanically at my obedience.

No point lying about that. No point getting angry, either. It was just a game to them, after all, and I wanted these demons to see that I was human, I will always be a human, and that I was going to use that fact to survive.